A Garden Caught in a Housing Squeeze

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Published: May 18, 1998

Correction Appended

Gardeners look at the corner of Crimmins Avenue and East 141st Street in the Bronx and marvel at the transformation of a vacant, garbage-strewn lot frequented by drug dealers into the garden of their dreams. There are flowers, vegetables and herbs. There are tables for dominoes, a scampering puppy and even a chicken coop.

The other day they planted a tree, a Canadian hemlock. ''We are here to tell heaven and earth we are planting a new tree,'' a man said in Spanish, as two dozen people stood in a circle. ''This will be its home.''

Not for long. Others look at the site of the Crimmins Group Association Garden and envision houses rising from the spot where two six-story apartment buildings burned down more than a quarter-century ago. They endorse the Giuliani administration's decision to turn the city-owned lot over to a nonprofit group in November for construction of three two-unit homes -- the continuation of a housing renaissance that has added 30,000 units to the borough over the last decade.

And housing remains a critical need, particularly in this tattered corner of Mott Haven, where there are just six vacancies among 921 housing units, said Lee Stuart, lead organizer for South Bronx Churches. Her group is to build the homes on the garden site.

''There is literally no place where people can move,'' Ms. Stuart said. ''It's just tight, tight, tight.''

Both gardeners and builders are convinced that they are helping the neighborhood. The community gardeners point to their history of coming into devastated slums and transforming them with sweat into urban oases. Housing advocates assert that the city's greatest need is affordable housing, though many commend gardeners for filling in the temporary voids with blossoms.

For years, the two sides have maintained something of a truce. But City Hall has begun pressing for faster development of city-owned vacant lots, partly because of tightening space for housing. To further this goal, it recently transferred the bulk of the 750 community garden sites to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development.

Although the city has no immediate development plans for most of the sites, the gardeners fear that their dream has begun to wither. Beginning in the early 1970's, as squatters, they began to reclaim vacant lots one by one. The process was institutionalized in 1978 when a city agency, Green Thumb, was established to oversee the gardens, using Federal anti-poverty grants. The number of gardens grew to 410 in 1983. Then the growth slowed, and began to reverse in the last year, according to garden organizations.

''Community gardeners have earned the right not to have to fight for their gardens,'' declared Steven Frillmann, executive director of Green Guerrillas, a principal advocate. ''They are like poster people for the quality of life.''

Although there have been demonstrations and court battles over the loss of gardens on the Lower East Side and Upper West Side, those are aberrations. In most cases, the gardeners leave quietly. The strongest response from most gardeners at the Crimmins Avenue site was that they just wished it was not happening.

''Maybe they give me another one,'' Cruz Concepcion, the garden president, said quietly. ''We are poor. We need a place like this.''

When the group is evicted in November, it will be the second time it has been kicked out of a garden. Three years ago, they were evicted from a smaller plot on the other side of the same block. That was also supposedly to make way for housing, but the site has never been anything but a ragtag parking lot.

At the garden's center is a ''casita,'' or little house, with a porch and a Puerto Rican flag fluttering from the top. Some garden advocates believe that casita gardens, where hens lay eggs, men drink beer and children roll in the dirt, are the most vulnerable.

''People who are white-collar bureaucrats are going to make decisions based on the appearance of gardens,'' said David Lutz, program director for the Neighborhood Open Spaces Coalition, a garden supporter. ''Casita gardens are not necessarily the most beautiful.''

The Crimmins group was joined this spring by another gardening group, one also evicted to make way for housing. The Hostos Herbal Medicine and Cultural Garden, organized by professors and students at Hostos Community College, is devoted to cultivating plants -- sometimes the very weeds found in vacant lots -- that are believed to have healing qualities.

The Hostos group had to give up its portion of a three-acre garden in Hunts Point after its last harvest to make way for two- and three-bedroom homes.

''To pit housing against gardens is too bad, but it's really where we're at,'' said William Frey, vice president of the Enterprise Foundation, which builds homes for lower and middle-income families.

Housing and garden advocates say that what is needed is a standard approach for weighing the best use for each site, one that begins years before a rumbling bulldozer turns up. ''You can't have these political battles at the end of the process,'' said Kathryn S. Wylde, former president of the New York City Housing Partnership.

In fact, Ms. Stuart said that the Crimmins group's previous garden site -- taken by the housing agency in 1995 -- may not be ideal for housing development because of its size and shape. She said the church group may give it back to gardeners, something it has done several times in the past.

From the gardeners' perspective, each new garden means back-breaking work. It took nearly a year for the Crimmins group to remove garbage, including whole abandoned cars.

During a long day of work, the local people and the Hostos gardeners seem to get along nicely. They speak in Spanish, and share folk knowledge about plants -- how juniper fights viruses and periwinkle cancer. They share pizza. On other days, they have made Spanish cheese and roast pork with rice and beans.

Working very hard was Julio Reynoso, 42, who has built fences and flower beds. ''This is a way for my children not to be cramped up in an apartment,'' he said, ''and I love plants.''

He pointed to a warbler vigorously bathing in a little pool the gardeners had created. ''If they build a building here,'' he asked, ''will the bird come?''

Photo: To make room for new houses, the Crimmins Group Association Garden in the Bronx will disappear in the fall. Julio Reynoso, who has helped build the garden, plants seedlings with his sons Eddie and Gabriel. (Barbara Alper for The New York Times) Map showing the site of the Crimmins Group Association garden: The city wants to build housing at a site used as a community garden.

Correction: May 22, 1998, Friday An article on Monday about a plan to replace a Bronx community garden with housing gave an incorrect spelling in some editions for the surname of a resident who helped build the garden. He is Julio Reynoso, not Reynosa.